With great pleasure, Atlassian presents Confluence 4.1. With numerous improvements for content presentation, it delivers the extraordinary new Autoconvert feature, along with attractive new image effects, find and replace, new icons, improved translation features and global PDF stylesheets.

Highlights of Confluence 4.1

Autoconvert for Pasted Links

When you paste URLs into Confluence, Autoconvert will now analyse what you are pasting and automatically convert it into something that will display well in Confluence. Examples include YouTube videos, JIRA issue queries and Google Maps; many other content types are supported.

YouTube URLs

Create the widget below with Autoconvert, simply by pasting the YouTube URL onto the page.

Quick find and replace

Updating your wiki content is now easier with the new find and replace feature. Using familiar conventions, automatically find and replace specific text strings within your Confluence page or blog. It's also accessible with a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F (Windows) or Cmd-F (Mac OS).

Follow Your Network On the Dashboard

See recent updates from just the people you follow in Confluence, with the new network tab on the Confluence dashboard. With this, following a few people in different parts of your company to make a quick filter of the main events happening outside your immediate team.

Space attachments macro

The new Space Attachments macro allows you to show all the attachments in the current space on your page. You can even filter them by file extension. Previously, you've only been able to show the attachments on the current page, using the Attachments macro.

Simply type {space-attachments} into a page to use it.

Global PDF stylesheets

Set your custom PDF stylesheets at the global level, as with custom layouts. When there is no specific individual space stylesheet defined, PDF space exports will fall back to this global stylesheet. This means that users won't have to re-apply the same stylesheet to all their individual spaces. This is an efficient way of achieving one look and feel.

Use any character in page titles

Confluence now allows "special" characters in your page titles, such as semicolons and exclamation marks. This allows more descriptive page names and generally removes restrictions when creating page titles and naming your content.

New translation feature

For those customers working on creating translations of the Confluence user interface, the 4.1 release has a new feature that will help. After opening the Confluence dashboard, you can simply add this text to the end of your Confluence URL, like so:

Then press Enter.

This will then cause each element of the user interface to display its special key name while Confluence is still in an interactive mode. This makes it easier to find the essential context for each key, which can then be searched on http://translations.atlassian.com where you can enter an appropriate translation for your custom language pack.

The key names are displayed with a "lightning bolt" graphic between elements of the names. For example, the buttons will show up with elements shown like so:

For the Browse menu, you can find its associated system.space.menu key on http://translations.atlassian.com. When you use this new translation feature, you can see the full context of the user interface elements. By understanding where a feature appears on the interface, for example the Browse menu, you can write a more meaningful translation for your users.

To turn off the translation view, use this:

Other improvements

As always, we have made various small improvements to Confluence.

General improvements

Favourites have been refinedYou'll now see a newly named and cleaner Favourites tab in your personal space. Additionally, the list of favourites is now paginated and you can click the stars to remove favourites.

Global plugin & macro timeout settingThere is now a globally configurable timeout setting. This will stop pages going into a permanent loading state. In the past, this could lead to instability issues.

New JSON RPCConfluence now has a JSON RPC library. This offers a way for Javascript developers to more easily access the Confluence API. For more details, see the documentation.

Editor improvements

Copy and paste table improvementsYou can now copy and paste multiple table rows and entire tables. There are also new keyboard shortcuts. You can now use Alt+Up Arrow or Alt+Down Arrow to add a row above or below the current row.

Copy and paste list improvementsIf you copy and paste list items from one list to another, the list content will now be joined together as expected.

New icons

Based on customer feedback, this version of Confluence has a number of redesigned interface and installer icons. These new designs add more of a contemporary look and feel and are aimed at improving icon consistency and ease of use in Confluence.

General Confluence Icon

Installer icons

User Interface icons

Helping you transition to the Confluence 4.x generation

We've created a set of resources to help you manage the transition to Confluence 4.x. The change management resources are listed under the current documentation.

Confluence Quick Reference Guide

Kick-start Confluence adoption with the Origami Necktie – full of tips and tricks to help your users get off the ground running. Get yours now!

Release notices

Upgrading from a previous version of Confluence

We strongly recommend that you back up your Confluence Home directory and your database before upgrading. Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade your test instance to this release.

When upgrading from a previous version of Confluence, if you have customised your cache settings (as documented in Cache Performance Tuning) then you may run into memory problems during the wiki to XHTML migration. We are working to fix this in a later release, but in the meantime you can revert your ehcache.xml to the default version.

Removed functionality

Features removed from Confluence

Personal labels

The ability to create personal labels is being removed in Confluence 4.1. You will still be able to access any personal labels you have created previously by going directly to http://<confluence_url>/users/viewmylabels.action

Mail archivingThis feature is being disabled by default in Confluence 4.1. However, it is still bundled as the Confluence Mail Archiving plugin, and easy to restore. Current users of the feature will not suffer any interruption, as the feature will be automatically kept in an operational state if you are using it. See details.

The SVG graphics library Batik Any plugins that previously relied on the Batik package being provided by Confluence will now have to bundle their own version of Batik into their plugin. See details.

A big thank you to everyone who helps us ensure that Confluence keeps getting better and better!

In summary, I'm finding it very difficult to understand how features removed like this follows Atlassian's stated company values, at least without any prior gathering of customer feedback (at least not visible to most of us).

I just upgraded from 3.5.5 to 4.1 manually and everything went well. I must commend the team as 4.1 looks very polished and appreciate retaining tar.gz version for power admins like myself as it makes my job so much easier.

Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't the release notes or documentation note that there are new startup and shutdown files being used? See my comment on the manual upgrade.

Thanks for the compliments. I seem to remember that we modified documentation to include the description of startup and shutdown scripts. I will find out and answer your comment on the manul upgrade page.

Anonymous

Is there a page tree alternative to the old 'View in Hierachy' option? Just upgraded from an early 3.x version...so far so good but as we move a lot of pages around would be great to be able to see the tree structure while doing this...

Anonymous

Anonymous

The plain text editor is still not back. With the current editor I can not even copy paste my entire page and get it back the same way it appears on the source page. This happens in my case for a crossed out bulleted list. Yes, this is very specific, but I did not look at any other probably existing bugs. This is simply a prove that we are in urgent need of a plain text editor. The current "great feeling" editor simply does not do the job that the most basic editor should have, i.e. copy and paste in a consistent manner.

It is possible to add a caption, and it's just taken me half an hour to figure out how to do it. You need to add a comment to the attachment in the 'Attachments' view of the page, and use the 'Instant Camera' image effect when displaying the image on the page.

That's not exactly intuitive. Also, you'll need to re-do the comment each time you upload a new version of the image.